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It’s time to unionize the gig economy

The modern definition of work is changing so fast that it’s hard to keep up. It’s like running ahead of a snowplow. Whether piled or melted, Canadian snow has to go somewhere, but in a changing climate, will there even be snow?

Demonstrators, including Uber drivers, couriers and other outsource and contract workers march to call for more favourable employment rights for those engaged in 'precarious work' in central London on October 30, 2018. In Canada, unions are struggling with the idea of representing contract workers. (DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Business thinks short-term and wants to lower costs, unions want higher pay and new members, and government presumably hopes to get things done in the most efficient way possible. Which of the three will be the first to modernize, and do it well? It is one awkward problem.

Journalist Kathryn May of iPolitics has written a rather splendid piece about the dilemma faced by the first Canadian union to come up with a plausible plan to deal with contract work. Everyone should read May’s elegant summary of what turned out to be a real mess. (Readers, set aside more time for active worrying.)

The plan failed, for one thing. Unionized professionals in the public service deferred the problem for a year, with the 60,000-strong Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada having decided not to create a smaller organization for professionals who work on contract, at least not yet. “Professionals Canada” would have represented independent contractors who compete with salaried government employees for public sector work. As May writes, it would have been a “new kind of unionism … at the vanguard of the labour movement” that represented workers in the gig economy. It would have spread fast.

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But traditionalists couldn’t imagine fighting contracting-out while representing both employees and contractors. Their interests clash. Even though the sector was small, they wouldn’t budge, and that includes 15,000 computer specialists whom presumably can see the future better than anyone. Tech flows. You swim with it, you don’t tread water.

This is an “I’m all right, Jack” problem, with entrenched interests undermining a united front against economic warping and abandoning the most helpless workers, like Europeans watching young migrants drown in the Mediterranean.

But if unions abandon the idea of representing precarious workers, they risk becoming almost irrelevant, especially in declining industries. As more work is handed to artificial intelligence and more sectors wither, who will represent the temps?

The problem for unions is partly generational — older workers with pensions and benefits abandoning the young and skint — but it also affects business, which will have fewer customers with sufficient earnings to afford its products. And it’s government’s job to find a compromise somewhere.

It’s the old problem of me vs. we, which the wonderful WE/ME organizations set up by anti-poverty activists Craig and Marc Keilburger are dealing with in Canada. Individuals cannot improve the world significantly, they say, without working in groups that grow. Only by moving from “Me” to “We” can we build change. Not since the Industrial Revolution have workers been so puny, so easily abused. And they were children.

I often think of the gloomy poem “Toads” by Philip Larkin. “Why should I let the toad work squat on my life?” he wrote, disgusted. (Years later, he wrote another poem, “Toads Revisited” in which he changed his mind.) The trick is to make jobs more than toad-like, with reasonable certainty and well worth having. Unions that don’t reach a hand out to contractors are as bad as the businesses that contract out. They turn workers into toads.

It’s a moral dilemma as much as an economic one. Ontario Premier Doug Ford cancelled most of the Liberal government’s measly improvements for hourly workers, even while Ottawa offers help in the federally regulated sector. Was it ideology? Spite? The need to keep toads toadish?

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Making contract work standard is not tenable for stable life in this country. My minimum standard for civilization is that I don’t see desiccated bodies in the streets on my way to work. When people don’t have pensions …

Try to imagine 2050. We’ll have to kick them out of our way as we head to our jobs dusting robots and maintaining even temperatures for Neat-O Meat-O (it’s lab-grown, feels no pain).

The professionals union will meet again in 2019. So unions have one year in which to earn the great honour of being the first to shape-shift.

Heather Mallick is a columnist based in Toronto covering current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick

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